"Habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, and excessive harvesting have caused declines in wildlife populations throughout the world. Reintroduction programs have become an important tool in restoring or augmenting such wildlife populations. Reintroduction programs that release small numbers of individuals risk lowering the level of genetic variability within populations and increasing the degree of population differentiation among the reintroduced populations. Maintaining high levels of genetic diversity is thought to be important to population viability through the influence of heterozygosity on population growth rates, metabolic costs, and individual adaptability to new environments." "…establishment and maintenance of genetic variation are now recognized as levels of biological diversity requiring conservation by the World Conservation Union." P. 895

"During the 1900s, extensive unregulated logging and trapping caused drastic population declines and widespread extirpation of fishers throughout much of the United States. As a result, the only remaining viable populations of fishers in the United States occurred as remnant in remote regions…" p. 896

Fisher reintroductions became more widespread after the first in Nova Scotia in 1947 when it became known that fishers prey upon porcupines. P. 896

"Records for most reintroduced populations of fishers are complete with respect to source population, number of individuals released, and location of the release site. Thus, this species provides an excellent model to assess effect of reintroductions on the gene dynamics of source and reintroduced populations." P.896

"…our analysis of the reintroduced populations indicated that a significant proportion of the genetic variance was partitioned among populations despite the fact that several of these populations share common sources." P.902

"Effects of random genetic drift are most prominent in populations founded with low numbers of individuals, and rare alleles are especially likely to be lost during population bottlenecks." "Divergence of allelic frequencies between pairs of reintroduced and source populations also suggests that genetic drift and sampling error might have influenced loss of source alleles from their associated reintroduced populations." P. 903

"Heterozygotic deficiencies observed within local populations in Vermont and within states throughout the north-central and northeastern parts of the fishers’ range indicate the potential that some type of fine-scale social structure may exist. Data on movement, territoriality, and mating tactics in fishers also are consistent with the hypothesis that population structure may revolve around a social system involving female philopatry, male-dominated polygyny, and random male dispersal."